Studios Chats Noirs

EUROPE - 2018

July 2019, with a friend we left Paris to travel around Europe by train. Our trip lasted two weeks.

From Paris to Strasbourg, to Basel, Bologna then Venice, Bari and finally Corfu Island. This is only our destination on the third day, early morning, and it feels like a few weeks have already passed. We stayed on a secluded beach for two nights. Being alone "somewhere in the world" kind of brought some peace of mind, as if time had stopped for a few days. From the beach, we had to hike for about 45 minutes to get to the closest village, to get some food and water. Under a tent, we shared a glass of tsípouro and some laughs with people from the village, before heading back to our camp.

We are now going to Saranda, Albania. We stayed a night there and took a bus to Elbasan, then Tirana, to take a night bus driving us to Skopje, Macedonia. We arrived around 6 AM, welcomed by an enthusiastic dog, tagged '6853', that followed us the whole day. We discovered the old bazaar of Skopje on the other side of the Vardar river, and met a lot of errant cats, before heading back to the train station to take a night train to Belgrade.

We now need to reach Timișoara, Romania, so we can get to our next stop : Budapest, Hungary. After crossing the Romanian border, walking for 15 km with our heavy hiking bags, under a beating sun, hitchhiked for the last few miles, we finally made it to Deta. And there, a train took us to Timișoara. It is 8 PM, no available room around the station, we had no other choice than staying overnight in a service station, trying to fight somnolence.

6 AM. It is finally time to go to Budapest, where we stayed two nights and roamed the streets, discovering local food. Our neighbour was a warmhearted old man, we played chess and discussed about life.

After a more relaxing stop, we were back on the rails, heading to Bratislava, Slovakia, then Ružomberok, and arrived in Liptovska Osada by bus. We wandered there for three nights, walking alongside the Revúca river, before heading back to France, in a 30 hours trip.